Creating Smaller Discussion Groups or Selecting Only Certain Students to See Specific Topics

Customer Success Team

May 14, 2019 13:22

Updated

A great way to organize board content for use by specific board followers or sets of board followers, without having to create individual boards, is by using the "Topics Memberships" feature.

By default all "board followers" (i.e., learners) will see all Topics that an instructor creates. However, as a board owner or administrator, it is possible to control which learners can see what Topics by managing Topic membership.

This feature is helpful if:

You are teaching a large class and want to divide learners into sub-groups*

You want different learners in your class to discuss different topics

If you want to create groups, create a Topic for each group and then restrict that Topic to only the students you want in the group (as described below). Then when the members of a group want to pin something that only their group will see, they just need to choose the Topic assigned to their group when they pin. Learners will be able to see all of the Topic names, but their feed will only be populated with Pins that have been assigned to Topics that they are assigned to as members.

To change which users see a topic:

1. Log in to a specific board.

2. At the ribbon, click Settings tab.

3. Click the Topics section.

4. Select the Topic, and options for the Topic will appear below the Topic list.

5. Select the followers you would want to add to a Topic to be able to see content tagged with that topic by checking the boxes next to each follower's name. If you want to add all followers at one time, check the box next to the “Topic Member”.

6. Click on Update Topic. You can undo changes you have not yet saved by clicking Cancel Changes.

* Yellowdig offers another mode, called "Automated Clustering," that is for very large classes and special circumstances where individual learners might be overwhelmed by seeing all content created by every other user in the group. This mode does require some initial set-up and must be initiated prior to a course. If your intended use will serve many learners and requires that they be divided into small clusters or cohorts, please contact clientsuccess@yellowdig.com and ask about this mode.